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The 28 winners of the 2023 AAHA Award for Proficiency in Primary Care award demonstrated an exceptional commitment to patient-centered care and the human-animal bond.

This week: Inaugural class at new veterinary school could get sent home come September, tracking baby turtles from the International Space Station, and would you like a lost-pet flyer with that pizza?

In July 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it was investigating a potential link between heart disease in dogs and the consumption of grain-free pet food. The FDA last week released an update on their investigation. And this time, they named names.

Open-heart mitral valve repair on dogs is a tricky procedure at best, and the usual success rate is 60% to 75%, depending on the dog’s size, age, heart status, and overall health at the time of surgery. Japanese cardiologist Masami Uechi, DVM, can boast a success rate of 90%. Soon, he'll be teaching US veterinarians how he does it.

The numbers are grim. According to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), female veterinarians are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than members of the general population. And while female veterinarians account for two-thirds of US veterinarians, their suicide rate is more than twice that for male veterinarians.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine recently approved Pexion (imepitoin tablets) to treat noise aversion in dogs. It’s a common condition—one study found that 40% of dogs may suffer from some degree of noise aversion—and one with possibly serious health implications, indicates a study that shows that noise aversion in dogs could be a sign of serous pain.

The opioid shortage is both a manufacturing issue and a manufactured one. The manufacturing part can be traced back to production issues at a Pfizer Inc. plant in Kansas and residual damage from last year’s Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, a major pharmaceutical manufacturing center. The manufactured part can be traced back to the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

The United States is battling an epidemic of opioid abuse that claimed 42,000 lives and caused 1,000 emergency room visits per day in 2016. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knows that veterinarians are on the front lines of that fight. And “doctor-shopping” patients are only part of the problem.

Which caregivers should be allowed to put their hands on a client’s pet? And under what circumstances? For that matter, what constitutes a qualified caregiver? A bill is coming to a vote before the California State Assembly’s Committee on Business and Professions next Tuesday that could change the answers to those questions, at least in California, and pose some thorny new ones with serious implications for the veterinary industry nationwide.

If you had a chance to talk face-to-face with the government officials you helped elect about the most pressing issues facing veterinary medicine today, what would you say? That’s the question facing nearly 100 veterinarians and veterinary students headed to Washington, D.C. for the American Veterinary Medical Association’s (AVMA) annual legislative fly-in.